An existing color picker application (or “app”) provides a way for a user to control the color of the illumination emitted from one or more luminaires of a lighting system (where the luminaires may be conventional ceiling or wall mounted luminaires, free standing luminaires or wall washers, or less conventional types of luminaire such as illumination sources built into surfaces or furniture, or any other type of illumination source for emitting illumination into an environment so as to illuminate the environment). The color picker app displays an image to the user on a screen of the user terminal on which it is running, e.g. the image being a photograph captured by an in-built camera of the user terminal, or a photograph or other type of image downloaded to an internal storage of the user terminal. The app then allows the user to select a region in the displayed image having a particular color (whether defined by a specific set of color space values or a range of color values), from amongst a plurality of regions in the image having a plurality of different respective colors. Once the user has selected the desired region, the app samples the color from the selected region and controls the lighting system to render a lighting scene comprising the color in question, via the illumination emitted from one or more of the luminaires of the lighting system.
This provides a user-friendly way for the user to select a lighting scene, in that the user can select an image that or he or she appreciates and then simply select one or more colors from this image.
However, due to limitations in the output of the one or more luminaires, certain colors are difficult (e.g. deep saturation) or impossible (e.g. brownish/black colors) to render by means of the luminaire(s). As an example, a nominally red light source may in practice be more orange and as such creating deep red colors is difficult. As another example, there could be limitations on the amount of blue light a luminaire is allowed to emit, in order to avoid damage (in the long run) to a reflector in the luminaire due to the high energy of the blue light. Other colors are impossible to render with a luminaire, such as brown or grey.
WO 2012/085742 discloses a color picker application which receives a selection from a user of a certain colored region in an image, but then adapts the actual color with which to emit from the lighting system depending on its capability to render the selected color.